


S.F.M.

by r_lee



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Caprica (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:51:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r_lee/pseuds/r_lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if: a look at Lacy Rand's adventures on Gemenon and beyond.</p>
            </blockquote>





	S.F.M.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lls_mutant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lls_mutant/gifts).



> A treat for you.

He grew up knowing his mother would meet a violent end. That was the way things were on Gemenon. It was the way things were all over the colonies, but it was especially so in the heart of STO territory. Soldiers of the One: he grew up in its shadow, in its embrace, never knowing any other life than the cloistered life of terrorism. The only thing was that he never saw it as terrorism. It was a fight for freedom, for belief, and once he was old enough to form his own opinions he realized he didn't give a good goddamn (or godsdamn, depending on the company) if there was one true God or a whole pantheon of them lining up to do the world favors. The one and only thing he believed in—and he believed fervently—was the power of disruption. And he learned that at an incredibly early age.

In a secondary sort of way he also believed in the power of deception. That lesson was drummed into his head from the time he remembered even hearing stories so he must have been two or three and even though the details didn't make a lot of sense to him, they stayed with him. Later, when he was old enough to understand the ramifications, he wore those details like a badge of pride, trotted them out whenever it suited him. From the safety and protection of their fortress in Gemenon, he grew up understanding that he was blessed, and he was special, and that in this life there was no cause for apology. People made their decisions and lived by them however they could, and if it caused others to suffer along the way... that was just part of the bargain.

*

The first time he heard the story he was too young to understand it, but by the time he was eight years old he knew it by heart: his mother had been sent to Gemenon against her will but against all odds flourished there. She'd fallen for a fellow member of the STO—a fairly routine love story, as far as he could tell—and when he was told to shoot her he refused. That, everyone knew, was the birth of the _real_ STO because it was his mother who instinctively knew how to communicate with the first Cylons. How can this be, they asked her incredulously (he knew that word by age five every bit as well as he knew the word _precocious_ ) and she responded she didn't know. It just happened.

"The big problem with loosely-run organizations," she told him when he was six, "is that they're so disorganized. It doesn't take a lot to disrupt them, and it doesn't take a lot to change them. All you need is drive and the right weapons. A willingness to see things through to the end doesn't hurt either. Oh, and you also need to be inventive, and to be charismatic and to make people believe that you deserve to be where you are. If you have those things, people will follow you anywhere and do whatever you ask. No, whatever you tell them." His mother was smart in a reckless kind of way; she'd adapted to circumstance and done so beautifully. His father was a nonbeliever sent to the STO by his own parents; before his death he'd told his son that going to Gemenon was the best thing that ever happened to him. "Because after all, I met your mother on that trip. I love her S.F.M." That, he came to know, was the sanitized-for-kids version of _so frakking much._ For the first seven years of his life he'd learned that and other lessons from his father, but the STO was a risky business and that's something they all understood. Dying for the cause was tantamount to some sort of minor sainthood, but he'd always looked on his father that way. It didn't take dying in a botched explosion to make that necessary.

*

Sixteen when she first came to Gemenon, it didn't take Lacy very long to take the measure of the way things were run. Kill or be killed was the order of the day and she very much did not want to die. She wanted the things most sixteen-year-olds want: to fall passionately in love, to have the passion returned. To make a difference, to stick it to authority wherever she could. She'd come a long way from the scared bicycle-riding schoolgirl she'd been at the start of the year. People always underestimated teenagers anyway: they were much smarter and much more capable of adapting than anyone knew. Her days in the attic blurred in the face of the immediacy and need for wits she found on the way to Gemenon, and those first weeks passed in another blur of _oh, gods—I mean God_ as Diego and Kevin and the rest of their STO accomplices alternately tried to play God and were literally shot down. What was the best way, she wondered, to thank Odin for not shooting her?

Relationships started in all sorts of strange ways, and besides, with Kevin and Diego gone and all the U-87s at her beck and call, assuming leadership was only natural. Those who didn't fear her respected her and for the first time in her life, she had a willing and true army at her disposal. The night she summoned Odin to her room, her fantasy was that together they'd change the world. He still didn't believe in monotheism any more than he believed in polytheism but as her name escaped his lips over and over in the night's heat of passion, he surely believed in her. Together, they forged a new dynasty and without a thought to the dangers involved, placed themselves squarely at the top. It was only practical. Someone had to take charge. Why not the girl with the backing of all of Gemenon's Cylons?

From there it was a short step to the Blessed Mother's front door, and faced with an army of angry recruits and U-87 models, there was little the Blessed Mother could do but grant them audience and hear out their proposal. At first she proposed a working partnership—power, once tasted, was a difficult thing to divest oneself of—but once she saw it would be impossible, the Blessed Mother accepted her fate with all the dignity she could muster. Lacy always wondered if it was easier to face a firing squad of robots than it was to face one of humans, but she hoped _she_ never had to find out.

Rebellions had been forged on far fewer demands than the ones she and Odin made that day, and she knew they were naive in thinking there was any such thing as a bloodless coup in the STO, but whoever donned the robes of the Blessed Mother held all the power and it surely couldn't be anyone but her. As long as her army stood at her side, she was golden and the vestments served as more than mere trappings of her position. They also hid a multitude of sins, including her ever-expanding belly. Toward the end of her pregnancy she took few visitors, but that part was easy. Not many had the nerve to try to fight their way in past the Cylon foot-soldiers, and if they did, they had to get past Odin and the rest to see her, and if they got that far, it meant they already knew that the Church had changed.

It was the cells on other planets that were the problem. It was people like Clarice who fancied themselves spokespeople without having the slightest idea what the goals really were or what it meant to be in charge. When Clarice came for an audience—she was only in her fourth month then and barely showing—she smirked and told her former captor she'd better kneel. They had a few things to discuss and wasn't it just rich the way the tables had turned? Clarice left stripped of any authority as far as the STO was concerned. She was free to preach and practice her beliefs but no longer had the backing of the Blessed Mother. _Turnabout hurts,_ she laughed at Clarice's retreating form, and hoped never to see her again.

Gemenon, as inhospitable as it was, became home. From the day he was born her son was protected, schooled in the ways of the STO. From his father he inherited a disregard for all manner of authority (Lacy loved that in Odin and didn't care that he never embraced the One True God; he was perfect in his stubbornness) and from her he inherited a taste for risk-taking and for never, ever settling. When his parents forged a partnership with the Tauran resistance forces bringing them more U-87s, he was there and when his father died on a mission to destroy the Pantheon in Illumini, he was there and when his mother who was wise in all things told him the writing was on the wall and it was no longer safe to stay in the only home he'd ever known, he was... ready.

He was nine years old and he was ready, and so was she, and their Tauran friends smuggled them to Sagittaron, where they could disappear into Tawa's impoverished streets and continue their work.

*

Like his father, religion meant nothing to him. He could take it or leave it but as a tender adolescent what he saw on the streets of his new home world made a mighty impact. At twelve he came home from school bruised and bloodied, and when his mother asked what happened he told her he took a beating for another student because he was bigger and stronger and knew he could stand it. For him, violence was nothing new; he'd seen almost everything on Gemenon. Bright and well-versed in the ways of subversion, he saw immediately how unfairly this new world of his had been ravaged and left for dead by the other colonies. How its people were enslaved and how greed and poor management had destroyed it.

That could all be changed. They were Sagittarans now and according to their paperwork and passports always had been; their Tauran friends had seen to everything. _We've given you a good new name,_ they said. _It means 'promise' in Tauran. Use it well._ So far they had but so far, they'd been lying low. That didn't suit him any more than it suited his mother. He could see it in her eyes.

"What if," he started cautiously (because changing one's focus took a lot of dedication, but he was as much his father's child as his mother's, and his mother knew that), "we work to change the wrongs of _this_ world instead of the religious beliefs of _all_ the worlds?" He wasn't sure she would go for it; she had been the Blessed Mother, after all, running the affairs of monotheism on all the worlds for as long as he'd drawn breath. But she was smart and amenable and most of all loved him, and he knew that counted for so much. When she told him she knew he could do whatever he set his mind to, that was when he knew he had her.

"Start small," she advised, "start small and demand the respect of your peers, and they will always know you're their leader. Here, let me help you." She still knew more than a few tricks from her STO days and he'd learned to fire his first gun when he was six. The combination was powerful, and he'd always had a lot of respect for explosives but the skill with which his mother taught him to use them was unparalleled. _Do it once and do it right_ was her best advice, and it was a lesson forged in steel and brought home with terrible force every time he remembered what it was like when they'd returned his father's body to their home on Gemenon.

*

Both of them were willing to die for their cause. They always had been and he knew that about his mother from the time he was tiny. That she became as active with the S.F.M. as she had been with the STO was a point of pride for him. That she stepped outside the bounds of his carefully-managed organization and went above and beyond didn't surprise him. That she'd lasted as long as she did surprised him, and he couldn't say seeing her assassinated by government agents was the least bit unexpected. That didn't mean he didn't feel it, though like any good soldier he grieved privately and carried on with his orders. That they were orders of his own making didn't make the least bit of difference: a plan was a plan, and he was old enough now to make it on his own. Sixteen: there was poetic justice in it. The same age his mother had been when she went to Gemenon. As far as he was concerned, he was just carrying on the family tradition.

He never really minded paying for his conscience, though. The day he blew up the seat of the government in Tawa he did it in memory of his mother and father, and didn't mind so very much that the name Tom Zarek became synonymous with both terrorism and freedom fighters. He preferred the latter, but his mother had always taught him that the only things a person could control were their own beliefs and actions, but never those of others. He knew who he was and what he fought for, and that was what mattered most.

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to Paige for beta-reading.


End file.
